The other day, as I was surfing blogs, I found a link to Pop It Forward, a promotion for Popchips. If you click on the link and fill out a form, they would send samples to three of your friends. I like Popchips so I signed up to send chips to my wife, my daughter off in college, and to my wife’s parents.

Then, today I received an email from popchips stating:

hi there. we're sorry to say that someone "mistakenly" posted a "pop it forward" link for popchips onto the web this past weekend. we're not sure why, but what was a hand-delivered invitation to a small number of people, ended-up online with tens of thousands of people signing-up. we're really sorry about the mix-up and hope you understand.

With that, they provided a link to a coupon for $1 off. The link now says

thanks for your interest in popchips - unfortunately this page is temporarily unavailable.

please check back with us soon.

happy snacking!

your friends at popchips

A quick search revealed the site is listed on many ‘freebie’ sites. It seems as if whomever is doing the social marketing for popchips didn’t understand the way something can go viral or ways to protect against getting inundated. They were overwhelmed by merely tens of thousands of people wanting free chips? If you want to have a limited invitation promotion online, you should use an invitation code and make sure each code only gets used once. Live and learn.